Call to Arms
by GingerNutGin
Summary: Yarne is forced into a one-sided LARPing match with Owain, much to his chagrin.


Yarne sniffed, the tip of his velvety nose dusting the ground. His long, angular ears twitched and rotated, swirling overhead to try and catch the slightest rustling.

_He _was here. Yarne could smell him. His hide twitched.

The forest was dense here, too, with the thick tree trunks pressed tightly together and the mossy floor nothing but a sea of roots. Yarne stepped carefully and slithered through the undergrowth. The sounds of his paws hitting the ground were muffled, and his breath was silent, but he was still frightened.

_Know the enemy_, he had been told. Unfortunately, Yarne had always been paranoid. Even if he knew that he had the upper advantage in such unyielding terrain, he still kept expecting a sword in his backside.

That thought alone made Yarne stop and crane his neck around, back towards the campsite. It was night, but Yarne had strayed so far that he could no longer see the red hot embers from the central bonfire.

Maybe if he wasn't a taguel, he might have seen it, but no matter how hard Yarne tried to squint through the brambles and briars, he couldn't see it. Everything in front, around and behind him was a burred mess. It was the only negative to being blessed with excellent hearing and smell.

He sniffed again and slowly inched forward, careful not to brush his fur against the thorns. He had kept low, and his muddy paws and underbelly slipped along the exposed clay. The bluish harness tied around his torso creaked as he crawled.

Squeezing his lean body between two thick trees, Yarne paused and pressed his nose against the mossy bark. It smelled earthy, dense, yet laced with musky sweat and sour metal. He knew that smell.

Yarne cringed and pressed himself lower to the ground. A thick whimper rose in the back of his throat. He felt trapped. The trees that pushed at his sides didn't help him any.

There was a soft crunch of twigs and leaves overhead, too soft for the wind and too loud for a small animal. Yarne's enormous ears jutted up. His glowing eyes widened.

He had been caught.

Another crunch, another rustle, and the rhythmic sounds of heavy breathing leaked into Yarne's ears. His heart raced, but he couldn't move. His rabbit-like instincts kept him utterly frozen on the spot.

The sounds grew louder. The breathing more ragged and strained, and followed by a low voice.

"Hark! What is that curious beast down at my feet, so foolish to crawl into my clutches… and coated in mud? What a sad sight. Such a torn-up hide would be unfitting for show, let alone a dining room floor!" The branches overhead shook for a moment, then were still, followed by a strangled gasp. "Stay still, sword hand! You shall taste thick rabbit blood soon enough…"

Yarne moaned and dropped to the ground. His long forelegs and paws covered his eyes. "Owain, stop it! This isn't fun anymore!" Then again, it had never really been all that 'fun' to begin with.

"'Owain'? Who is this, 'Owain'? You must be mistaking me for a lesser mortal, fiend," the voice said. "I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the wielder of the scared stones. I walk the path of radiance, dogging the heels of warriors who have blessed me with but a drop of their greatness. Such the likes of you _would _confuse the Chosen One with another, foul taguel."

"My mom would kill you if she heard you right now," Yarne said, his voice muffled by the fur of his paws. "Seriously, you sound like a bigot." He tried to make himself sound confident, but he ended up stuttering instead.

"Silence, you flop-eared whelp!" Owain cried from his perch. "Forget what I said before. It seems that you shall make a fine rug after all. Have at you!"

A thick, crudely woven net dropped onto Yarne and broke him out of his frozen stance. He screamed and thrashed up against it, his powerful legs kicking at the ropes and tangling them as he flailed. "Owain, get me out of this thing!" he cried.

"Ha! As if I would be foolish enough to show mercy to your feeble pleads!" Scrambling down the tree's side, Owain quickly brushed off his cloak and placed a hand on the hilt of his sword. "I shall skin you alive, as penance."

"Nono! Get away from me!" Yarne wailed and writhed against the ropes. His instincts took over, and his long, hare-like body flashed and changed into his smaller, 'human' form. Instead of a long, sleek hare, there was a small man, brown-furred with a thick mane practically drowning underneath the net's weight.

At this, Owain paused, and his triumphant grin faded into a small frown. "Oh, come _on_, Yarne. You're not supposed to change back till page eleven!" He pulled out a worn booklet from his pocket and flipped through it. "Let's see here…"

Yarne rolled over on his back and clawed at the ropes with his fingers. "I never wanted to do stupid improv with you in the first place!" he cried.

"It's _not _improvisation, you philistine. It's carefully mended scriptural acting." Owain licked his thumb and leafed through the pages. When he found the right one, he turned the book's face to Yarne and stabbed at the scribbles with his thumb. "See? At page eleven the ferocious beastman (that's you) is supposed to rise up from the net and strike out at the well-endowed, handsome hero (that's me)."

Yarne rolled his eyes and took a deep breath. His arms and legs relaxed, and he let the net drape over him. "Now I get why everyone else avoids you." He sighed.

Owain folded the book back into his pocket and plopped down cross-legged in-between the tree roots. "Where'd you get that idea?" he asked. "I got plenty of friends, I'll have you know."

"Like who?" Yarne turned his head to the side and peered up at Owain through the net holes. "Face it, Owain, you always were kinda… special."

"And you'd rather have me be all grim and hum-drum?" Owain leaned forward and started untangling the net, occasionally cursing every time the rope chaffed at his fingers.

In the back of his mind, Yarne knew that he could have advised him to just cut at it with his sword, but he conveniently let it slip his mind. Instead, he just closed his eyes and listened to Owain work around him. "You're implying that the others are boring?" he asked.

Owain snorted. "Well, not _all _of them. I meant like Lucina and Gerome. They've both got lances right up their backsides most of the time."

"Maybe you would too if you cared about what was going on right now," Yarne said. He crossed his arms behind his head as he watched Owain tug and pull at the knots.

"That's rich coming from you, Yarne." Owain laughed.

"Excuse me? I've got a whole lot more to worry about then _they _do!" Yarne sat up, the net still bunched up over his head and around his dangling ears. He frowned. "I mean no offense to them. This isn't a _contest _or anything, but they at least don't have to deal with being the last surviving member of an entire race!"

Just as Yarne moved, Owain slipped the knots loose and pulled the tattered net away, bundling it into a large, uneven ball. "Man, this took me like a day to weave up…"

"See? Now you're not even listening to me." With the net taken away, Yarne relaxed and let his hands smooth back his mane and ears. He wasn't even annoyed anymore, just tired. "Self-centered, that's what you've always been."

Owain held the ball of netting in his lap, clutching at it like a toy. For once, he wasn't smiling. "I just thought that you'd find a little roleplay fun," he said. "I mean, we all need a little bit of it, right?"

Yarne stood up and brushed some of the dried, caked-up mud off of his skin matted hair. He only just glanced at Owain. "Fun? Sure, I guess, but we got a war to fight right now, you know? We might as well spend it on something worth a darn instead of something this…" He paused, reluctantly, biting at his furred lip. "…childish."

"At least when Inigo says that to me, I know that he's not as much of a scared-"

"No!" Yarne snapped. "Inigo hates fighting just as much as I do, you know." He stepped back and leaned against the massive tree trunk behind him, stuffing his hands in his small pockets. "We all do. We'd be sickos if we liked it, and I totally get that this is your weird, weird way of coping with it by romanticizing it, but you can't go and do it all the time, you know? "

Owain was quiet for a long moment, long since tossing the ball of rope aside to flip through his worn notebook, filled with doodles and raw scripts that he had written over the years. His face was red, but either from embarrassment or frustration, Yarne didn't know. It was probably both.

Sighing, Yarne eased up from the trunk and stepped over the roots to Owain's side. He knelt down and reached out a hand. "I'm sorry, okay? No hard feelings?"

Owain glanced up at the hand and closed his notebook. He forced a smile and reached up to grasp it. "No, don't be sorry. You're right… I'm the one who should be sorry." But he didn't sound all too sincere.

And Yarne understood that. As he pulled up Owain at his side and smiled he knew that Owain's peculiar ways couldn't be neutered just by some spat-out comments, but as long as he understood, then that was alright.

"Come on." Yarne pointed in the vague direction of the campsite. "You wanna help me get back to camp? I can't even see the fire from out here."

All of a sudden, Owain grinned and slapped Yarne's furry shoulders. "I'll help you any day, my fine taguel citizen!" he cried, and began to pull at Yarne's arms for him to follow. "Come on now, this way! This way!"

And Yarne followed behind, unable to play along with the fantasy and yet just as eager to not upset it.


End file.
